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STAGE REVIEW: ‘Footloose’ is not all that fancy on Sovereign stage

By Stephanie Caltagirone

Reading Eagle correspondent

While the touring company of “Footloose the Musical” is talented and energetic, they can’t save the show that landed on the Sovereign Performing Arts Center stage Thursday night from being such a head-shaking mess.

I don’t even know where to start to make sense of what went wrong with this simple story about a boy who just wants to dance and the town that has outlawed it. There’s almost too much to choose from.

So let me pick on the smoke machine first. Actually, there must have been two smoke machines because every now and then billows of extraneous smoke would appear from the wings of the stage — for absolutely no reason.

Then there’s the “stage adaptation” by Dean Pitchford and Walter Bobbie, based on Pitchford’s original screenplay for the 1984 film starring Kevin Bacon.

Were Pitchford and Bobbie trying to be as corny as possible? Or was that just an unfortunate by-product of translating an enjoyable but decidedly B-list film into a viable stage show?

Whatever their motivation, they didn’t give director Gary John La Rosa much to work with, so he filled in with lots of awkward staging and some lackluster choreography from Chris Saunders.

And then there’s the music.

Most of the songs you’ll remember from the film are here — “Let’s Hear It For The Boy,” “Almost Paradise,” “Holding Out for a Hero” and the title song.

And wow, do they stick out among the rest of the so-bland-that-they’re-completely-forgettable songs by Tom Snow and Pitchford.

Between the book and the music, it doesn’t leave much for the cast to work with.

Which is too bad because leads Erik Keiser as Ren, and Lindsay Luppino as Ariel are talented singers and dancers. Keiser in particular manages to overcome most of his trite dialogue through the sheer force of personality.

And Kara Guy as Rusty and especially Michael Kennan Miller as Willard steal the spotlight whenever they step on stage.

Glenn Wall as Rev. Moore does a fair job of making his character more human than he’s written, while Katherine Proctor as his wife, Vi, must be channeling Dianne Wiest, who played the role in the film. She has the mannerisms and the smile down pat.

And maybe there lies the root of the problem — what works in film does not translate to live theater.

It merely looks like a rehash of something that should be just a little grainy and shown on a 30-inch screen.